Johannes Regis

The abundance of new information that has emerged since the mid 1980s concerning Ockeghem, Busnoys, Binchois, Du Fay and others has in many ways reshaped the landscape of mid fifteenth-century music. Meanwhile there have been major upheavals in our understanding of the works and careers of Josquin, Obrecht and other composers of the generation active during the last decades of the century. Regis's music and biography spans these two periods and two groups of composers in intriguing ways. On the one hand he is the only one among his contemporaries for whom extended personal contact with both Binchois and Du Fay, the two leading figures of the first half of the century, can be proposed with confidence. While on the other hand, Regis is the only composer of his generation to have several of his Latin-texted works published in Petrucci's prints of the early sixteenth century. Given this unusual profile, it now seems especially important to gain a clearer sense of Regis's career and to situate his works within the new historical picture.